Content area
Full Text
In this essay, we consider chick flicks, a subject that inspires highly polarized and ambivalent responses. Chick flicks have been both championed and vilified by women and men, scholars and popular audiences. Like other forms of "chick culture," chick flicks have been accused of reinscribing traditional attitudes and reactionary roles for women. On the other hand, they have been embraced as pleasurable and potentially liberating entertainments, assisting women in negotiating the challenges of contemporary life.
We contend that the most valuable and productive consideration of chick flicks requires looking at them neither in isolation nor as simply one area of film studies. Rather, chick flicks are best addressed as one form of a prominent popular cultural phenomenon that can be termed chick culture. This essay seeks to examine the polarized responses and the range of positions in between, not advocating a single position but seeking to complicate and explore the questions chick forms, especially films, inevitably raise.
CHICK CULTURE
While we hesitate to pin it down to a single, possibly reductive definition, chick culture can be productively viewed as a group of mostly American and British popular culture media forms focused primarily on twenty- to thirtysomething middle-class women. Along with chick flicks, the most prominent chick cultural forms are chick lit and chick TV programming, although other pop culture manifestations such as magazines, blogs, music-even car designs-can be included in the chick line-up. The dawn of chick lit, the wildly popular body of literature largely spawned by British author Helen Fielding's 1996 novel Bridget Jones's Diary, provides a fairly clear starting point for the chick cultural explosion.1 The TV series Sex and the City, based on the book by Candace Bushnell, appearing at the same time, provides another clue to its origins. As a phenomenon dating from the mid-'90s, the chick culture boom both reflected and promoted the new visibility of women in popular culture. What links the products of chick culture is, above all, "the contemporary media's heightened address to women" (Ashby). This deliberate address to female audiences suggested a growing recognition of women's significance in contemporary culture. The media reflected and even shaped women's complex social positioning-with its continued restrictions and its new freedoms-and their aspirations. At the same time, however, the...